a podcast about us and them

Trance, dissociation and the occult

One of the more sideways glances that Supreme Researcher Hannah dug up in her search for the neurobiological basis of hypnosis for Episode 7 of the podcast was this study: the experience of trance for people who (claim to) speak with The Other Side....

Despite increasing interest in pathological and non-pathological dissociation, few researchers have focused on the spiritual experiences involving dissociative states such as mediumship, in which an individual (the medium) claims to be in communication with, or under the control of, the mind of a deceased person. Our preliminary study investigated psychography – in which allegedly “the spirit writes through the medium's hand” – for potential associations with specific alterations in cerebral activity. We examined ten healthy psychographers – five less expert mediums and five with substantial experience, ranging from 15 to 47 years of automatic writing and 2 to 18 psychographies per month – using single photon emission computed tomography to scan activity as subjects were writing, in both dissociative trance and non-trance states. The complexity of the original written content they produced was analyzed for each individual and for the sample as a whole. The experienced psychographers showed lower levels of activity in the left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus and right precentral gyrus during psychography compared to their normal (non-trance) writing. The average complexity scores for psychographed content were higher than those for control writing, for both the whole sample and for experienced mediums. The fact that subjects produced complex content in a trance dissociative state suggests they were not merely relaxed, and relaxation seems an unlikely explanation for the underactivation of brain areas specifically related to the cognitive processing being carried out. This finding deserves further investigation both in terms of replication and explanatory hypotheses.

People enter trance states for many reasons - and get through via many means, including personal suggestion. For some, the trance state is the ultimate participation: it gives focus, clarity, space and breath. And for the medium, it creates a complex dissociation that, this study argues, is not passive, but active.

In other words, we are intrinsically motivated to participate in what is happening to us during trance. The question we ask in this podcast is how susceptible we are to others' intrusions when we're there.